5 Fitness Tips to Improve Your Fitness

5 Fitness tips that give you the opportunity to wear your new sports wear.

Trying to get your level of fitness up can be frustrating, especially when life gets in the way. Finding time to go to the gym or exercise class can sometimes seem like an impossibility when you are trying to nail the daily must do stuff like working and bringing up children. However there are some sneaky shortcuts that can help you get fitter quicker, and you might not even have considered them.

Walkies

Dogs are an excellent way to get out and to walk. If you have the kids with you, so what! They can all join in the activity. If you are on your own, you can combine your walking with a gentle jog if your dog is also fit an healthy. There are lots of groups now that allow you to borrow a dog if you do not have one, and by walking them, you are helping out another time pressured or housebound dog owner. Dogs are also great company and good for the mental state so your mood should improve too. Bending down to pick up his droppings is also a good if rather negative side of walking a dog!

Put Yourself Out

What can you do to inconvenience yourself? Sounds like a mad idea, but taking the stairs over the lift, or getting off the bus a stop early and walking are all good ways to increase your fitness without actively going to a gym. If you have to collect something from upstairs – run up don’t mooch as we are all prone to do. Stop sending the children to fetch you a cup of tea, and instead go yourself and have a little dance while waiting for the kettle to boil. Small changes soon add up.

Home Gym

Turn your house into a gym! Leave a set of hand weights out in the kitchen so you can lift weights while waiting for things to cook. Have your yoga mat in the bedroom so you can get in some stretching before bed or when you wake up. The only limits are your imagination. If you are ever waiting for something – the kettle, the bath to fill, etc. – move! Jump, skip, dance or hop around to pass the time and boost that fitness with ease.

Keep Exercise Short

Various studies have shown that shorter spurts of exercise are better than running for hours. Interval training is a prime example of this within a gym environment, but you can do your own at home. When you go for a walk challenge yourself to add a quick burst of running, once ever two mins for 30 seconds or so. Run to the end of the road and back a few times, you might get a few strange looks but don’t worry about that!
Count Your Steps

Fitness trackers are huge at the moment. There is a good reason for that; they do work. Not only do you get an idea of how much you are moving, but you can get competitive with yourself and start setting targets. A base target for the average healthy adult it 10k steps a day, but if you cannot manage that, wear your tracker for a few days and see what your average is, then add 1000 and challenge yourself to get that figure every day for a month.